The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it
always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled at its every pore;
and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom,
as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast
to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own
peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep.
But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort,
they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent;
for they regarded it, not as a fore-shadowing of evil in
the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged.
They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild
shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the old
Manxman said nay.
The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed
to see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found,
and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis
of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was
directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove
to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided
with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg
hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
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